Mezzanine Exhibition: Artpool versus the Poetry Bureau. Hungarian "mail art" in files from the Archives of the Andrzej Partum's Poetry Bureau

The “genes” of many artists, theoreticians, and art enthusiasts mixed in Artpool. Among them was Andrzej Partum, who received parcels and letters from Hungary. Did he reply to them? He certainly stored them in his Poetry Bureau in specially marked folders. Among the senders were Sándor Pinczehelyi, Endre Tót, László Beke, Dóra Maurer, Gábor Tóth, and Artpool.

Artpool was an archive founded in 1979 in Budapest by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay, whose collection began with the objects and documents preserved from the Chapel Studio, which was closed down by the authorities in 1973. The Chapel Studio was an independent art gallery and studio run by Galántai for four years in a cemetery chapel in Balatonboglár, with the consent of the parish priest. When its activities became no longer possible, it found a natural continuation in Artpool. From the beginning, Galantai proposed an active form of the archive’s operation. In the founding manifesto, he announced that the idea is not only to honestly collect and catalogue materials sent by post, but also to work actively with them. Galantai’s intention was to share information, access to which was heavily limited at that time.

Andrzej Partum founded the Poetry Bureau in 1971 in a small room in the attic of a tenement house at 38 Poznańska Street in Warsaw. By that time, he had published five volumes of poetry at his own expense. In some of those, he published works by his artist friends, including Alfred Lenica, Ewa Partum, Henryk Strumiłło, Koji Kamoji, and Henryk Stażewski. Soon, the Bureau’s activities led Partum to start sending slogans and manifestos to a large number of mail-art network members in Poland and abroad. Partum stated that the character of the Bureau was “creative and authoritative.” He undertook to register creative facts “within 48 hours of their submission” and “upon request to issue an opinion on the concept.” The Bureau was to operate “for the sake of information.” Access to the materials was authorized by a membership card.

Both archives have survived to this day and are currently in the care of cultural institutions. Artpool was incorporated into the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest in 2015 and from 2021 it operates as a department of The Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI).

The Archive of Andrzej Partum’s Poetry Bureau has been the property of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź since 2020.

As part of the MSŁ-Artpool joint project Archives of the Future, we were able to inspect the contents of envelopes sent from the Poetry Bureau. Among Partum’s dispatches, in addition to slogans and manifestos, were copies of his own works, including the well-known Alphabet Phonétique from the Muzeum Sztuki collection and the unknown Poem Zero Absolute by Andrzej Partum with the slogan in English: “Artist makes Maximum Art – Stop, 1976.” There was also a typescript of a letter with an invitation to participate in the Congress of Visual Text, which Partum organized with the participation of Hungarian and other artists at the Remont Gallery in Warsaw in 1977.

Soon, both archival collections will be combined onscreen in an interactive installation, as part of the upcoming exhibition for the project’s conclusion, to be held at the Polish Institute in Budapest on 5–7 November 2024.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a lecture entitled: "They visit Artpool. Report from the archive founded by Hungarian artists György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay in 1979 in Budapest", scheduled for October 24, 2024, moderated by Marta Pierzchała. The event will be held in Polish.

The presentation of archival materials is available daily, except Mondays and weekends, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Admission PLN 1. A ticket to the temporary exhibition at ms1 also entitles the visitor to view the presentation.

The Mezzanine Gallery is inaccessible to wheelchair users.